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This article was written on 21 Jan 2016, and is filled under Uncategorised.

In which I get my very own troll

I have a troll.

No big deal, as I think I know who it is, but someone keeps leaving comments on my blog which are just downright bizarre and which single out various women that I know for thoroughly tedious and downright dull abuse. I’m always in favour of abuse that is at least colourful and vivid, but this largely seems to consist of using the word ‘cunt’ over and over again.

This, it seems, is the central problem for trolls. They can’t, physically, do anything. At all. If it’s the person I think it is, he’s about three feet tall and would struggle to get items down from a high shelf without using a stick and starts multiple accounts on Twitter to harass women he thinks have wronged him in some great and nebulous way.

My troll lives at the point where the Venn diagram between trolls and stalkers overlaps. He feels some wrong was done to him in the past, which means that, in his mind, the people he stalks deserve punishment in some way, and he should be the means by which it is delivered, so that in his mind, he’s not doing anything illegal, but is a warrior for truth and justice. But how is this justice to be delivered?

That’s just it. He makes comments. He can’t make threats, because that’d be laughable coming from one so short, and can’t make any mutterings about terrible retribution because, again, he could do no more than kick me in the ankle before I sat on him and crushed him into the ground with my arse cheeks. All he has is the word ‘cunt’ which lost any power to shock about five minutes after it was devised.

So there he is, typing ‘cunt’ into his computer, over and over again, but the annoying thing for him is that the world doesn’t change. It just stubbornly carries on being, well, the world, and nobody really gives a rat’s arse about him one way or the other. This blog has taken about ten minutes to type, after which I’m having a meeting about Street Pastors and writing some copy. He has no say over any of that.

What trolling does is advertise the writer’s size, both literally and metaphorically. It’s a small man, again literally and metaphorically, writing stuff and his inability to do anything else. He thinks he’s striking a blow for whatever bizarre quest he’s set himself, but his every word, no, every syllable of every word, says ‘I’m weak and can’t do anything but get angry with you online’.

And as I’m a little bit twisted, this makes me laugh. Genuinely. Someone squirting little gobbets of bile at their own computer screen is funny in a way that they’ll never ever fully understand. I’m here, with a mug of tea, a biscuit and vague need to do some copywriting, while they’re taking their time to get terribly angry with me. One of us, it seems, is doing okay, while the other is getting all obsessed and behaving oddly.

So hello, troll. Information and IP addresses are, of course, being logged and passed over to various people with an interest in that kind of thing who are doing certain things I’m not at liberty to talk about because of Reasons, and I’d like to say to the troll one last, final thing. I’m a Quaker, so I nominally believe in non-violence unless – and this is an important caveat – I think that me or mine are being threatened. Just a little something to focus your mind.